


Is It His Jacket?

by Hevheia



Series: The Old Guard Duolingo Prompts [5]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Canon, it's just a little sad sorry, kind of, missing booker hours
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:00:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26910298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hevheia/pseuds/Hevheia
Summary: Even though Nile hasn’t been part of the family for long, she feels the stinging emptiness Booker leaves behind, like a gaping wound.Part of the The Old Guard Duolingo prompts series: a series I started posting on tumblr where I take random sentences from duolingo and use them as prompts for small drabbles of our favourite immortals!
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman
Series: The Old Guard Duolingo Prompts [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1952467
Comments: 4
Kudos: 64





	Is It His Jacket?

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Is it his jacket? (è la sua giacca?)

Even though Nile hasn’t been part of the family for long, she feels the stinging emptiness Booker leaves behind, like a gaping wound. A hole where something once fit perfectly that nothing can replace quite right, a hole that’s difficult to move around, no matter how hard they manoeuvre themselves or how hard they ignore it.

It’s strange how people become more present in their absence.

The thing is that the hole lives inside all of them, because Booker did (and does) too. And the edges of their holes are raw and infected due to the way that piece of them was torn away. By his own doing, of all things. 

_Betrayal._

Of course Nile has experienced betrayal before and all the ugly, piercing agony it leaves behind, but never on this scale. She hasn’t grasped enough of her immortality yet to realise what Booker’s betrayal might’ve meant for them. (Whenever she tries to imagine, she shivers and pushes the thoughts away.)

But neither has she tasted enough of eternity yet to think a hundred years is a mild punishment for what he has done.

She sighs and puts her bag down on her bed. The safehouse is chilly, Nicky is still trying to get the heating to work. Joe is probably helping him or checking if there’s anything to eat. And andy is doing god knows what, maybe scouting outside or checking for hidden cameras or traces of recent intrusions. They’ve become careful ever since Merrick.

What would Booker be doing now? she asks herself. 

Her hole, her _ache_ , is different from the others, but no less profound. Her naivety hadn’t been the only reason she wanted to let him off with an apology. The truth is Booker understood her. Of all of them, he was still closest to his mortality, to all the pain and confusion that came with losing it. With losing your family. He understood her in ways the centuries had gently dulled and diluted in the others. 

_A hundred years_ , she reminds herself. A hundred years will be nothing in the grand scheme her life has become. However, that doesn’t make it feel any less unbridgeable now.

She opens the closet to put away the few clothes she owns thanks to a shopping trip with Joe. She pauses when she sees the jacket, hanging forlornly on its hanger. She glances at the bed and it occurs to her the safehouse only has three bedrooms. 

Her hands reach out. The leather is cold and a little worn beneath her fingers as they glide along the sleeve. There’s a bullet hole in the shoulder, she notices as she takes it from the hanger. It smells of mothballs and being unworn and forgotten for too long. 

When she turns around, jacket in her hands, she doesn’t jump when she sees Andy standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame and observing her with those knowing eyes that have seen thousands of years. Hundreds too many. 

“Is it his jacket?” Nile asks even though she knows.

Andy only nods. Nile looks down at the jacket again. A teardrop falls on the leather with a soft thud, darkening the black material in a perfect circle.

_A hundred years. Only a hundred years._

When Nile wears the jacket for their next mission, she knows the others notice it. She also knows they are all secretly relieved that at least in this very small way, he’s with them too.


End file.
